The Brazos Riverside Conference in Lake Whitney, TX

There we go.

Yeah. Can we move that closer

that OK,

Thanks.

Morning, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic.

It's not that my knees are bad, I just like sitting on bar stools.

Anyway, I'm very honored to be here in the middle of all this spiritual energy and listen to the speakers and presenters. It's really very moving.

And I've known for a long time that there's great a A in Texas and I've known

a lot of the great Texas AARS

and I'm, I'm glad to be here.

When I think about Alcoholics Anonymous, I get goosebumps

that this society

exists on planet Earth like an Oasis

and it just expands by one alcoholic talking to another.

There's no real

plan other than God's plan. And when it's time to go in the next country, it goes there.

And then pretty soon it gets translated and then it just keeps moving.

And I don't think when we looked at the very beginning, we could have dreamed that this could have happened.

And

it did. And it finally got me in 1964 and it dragged me in

and I fell in love. The first night

I was very sick.

I was an outpatient fundamental ward

and shook and was frightened and I had

been drinking even as an outpatient and they knew I knew they were going to catch me and throw me out of the Marine Corps. And I somehow just dialed a A on this Sunday and my

back in those days, you didn't go to a meeting. You were taken by your sponsor. You called and then they sent you someone to your house and he came and

great big guy named Bill Terwilliger. He's my sponsor for 42 years

and

all I remember him saying was get in the car. That's all I remember

and I went there to the Manassas group and it was a group anniversary and it went on forever. I had been sober 3 hours when the meeting started and I was sober 8 hours when the meeting ended.

And they had

group anniversaries. They had Turkey and ham and I wasn't eating anything and I just shook and people were so happy with sobriety. And then they had square dancing

after it was over,

players and

Old Charlie Linden was what was a member out there, the Arkansas Traveler. Some of you may remember Old Charlie

and I at one point decided to leave.

Nobody was paying attention to me. I was snuck out on the porch and it was sleeping. There were no St. lights. There was. It was just like, I don't remember exactly, was an Odd Fellows hall, and I couldn't tell which way to run.

It just was

confusing.

And an Al Anon lady

named Betsy Lynch

came up and put her hand on my shoulder and I turned around and it looked like an Angel. And she said, come on back in, it's going to be fine. And it was. And it's been fine ever since. And so my hat's off to Al Anon from the first second that I got here.

I'm going to talk a little bit about my story, but I like talking about our society more than anything

and so I'll try and do it in 10 minutes. The brief version of a crash

and I grew up in New Haven, CT in 1931.

My parents went through the depression and survived. They were really just positive outlook. I've one sister, she has 31 years in a A now

while I'm doing statistics, I have six children and 15 grandchildren and two daughters in a A and one grandson in a A. So I've got 3 generations covered. I hope you're all doing your share.

None of my sons made it in, though All three of them were into drugs and alcohol in college. And I pictured the four of us talking at a conference someday and they one by one said, well, enough of that. I think I'll straighten out and be a normal, responsible, wonderful citizen. And part of me is ashamed of them, to tell you the truth.

I don't get it, to tell you the truth, but they're wonderful.

And I had the same feeling that every other alcoholic has, that I didn't belong in that family. I didn't belong on planet Earth.

My mother was a Catholic, my father was a Protestant. He had to convert. His family was very upset

and I sat in the church with my sister who still goes there and thinks it's the most wonderful place in the world. And from the day she went there, she felt comforted

and loved. I, on the other hand,

felt like it was sort of a German prison camp of some sort. And the little Gestapo nuns were coming up and they were speaking in Latin and God knows what they were plotting. And

I was very nervous about confession because I knew they were gathering evidence for the trial later on

and this So I was not a cappy little kid. It was I was always on the edge of

fainting or very nervous and I was probably about nine. I looked up at the crucifix and it was enormous in the just couldn't miss it

and it was like it spoke to me and it said, little boy, do you see this and way out. Well, that's what God did to his only Son that He loved.

Guess what he's going to do to you?

And that did it. Boy, I was just, I did not like going there. It just scared me. Now, that's not what the church taught. That's what I decided that it taught. That's what I made-up in my little head

and my sister saw an entirely different world. And so

it ended up I was a very good student, IA good athlete, in spite of having polio. I recovered from that. It was a miracle. And I went into a little prep school, funneled me right into Yale University. I got down there for the first time in my life, I felt that I was in the wrong place. I had worked on their buildings. I was in construction, did all kinds of climbing and that kind of work. But these guys that came from all around the country,

they were all rich and they were all handsome and they all knew what was going on. And I didn't know why I was in their midst. It was that sense. I knew they were going to discover an impostor and ask that I leave because I certainly didn't qualify to be in their ranks. And so I hadn't had a drink yet and I felt very uncomfortable,

but I was at a social event where I just couldn't even approach anybody to talk to them.

I could see in their eyes that they didn't want to even know me. And so I did have some drinks and after about 2 1/2 I turned around and unbelievably, everyone wanted to know me.

Everyone in the room was begging me to be their friend.

I couldn't believe this. It was like, my God, what is this all about?

And I just ran over and started talking to everybody. And I was free from my fears. My creativity had been released. I could be me for the first time in my life. And I understood what people were saying. Isn't this a wonderful world? And I said yes,

it is, and I wished I had started drinking at grammar school.

It was just wonderful.

And later on I said to myself that that was 3 drinks. I wonder what 20 will do. And I did that and

got sick and you know what it feels like the first time and you I slept on the bathroom floor and vomited and it just felt so awful as the sun came up. And I remember sitting on my bed with my head splitting and the thought occurred to me, are you going to drink tonight? And it was just a split second. And I went, yes, yes, this

hatchet in my head

is a small price to pay for what I had last night,

because what happened to me is what happens to all Alcoholics. It was close to a spiritual awakening.

It solved every problem that I had told me who I was. It made me at peace with you, with the world, with God, with with myself. It was just such a power to transform my world

and without realizing it, I naturally was willing to pay any price for this. And I started paying it with grades. The high grades went and then the athletics went and then I'm getting in fights and now I'm in jail. Now. May not graduate, but I did barely, probably by point. OOOO, one at the best. And the Korean War was going on the draft, and some of us joined the Marine Corps.

And after the rude awakening of their greeting when you arrive.

Wow.

I went off for six months of training to be a platoon leader. And while I was there, I decided I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. And I was part of something and it was something. And I was, it was an honor to be in there. And I've only wanted to be in two outfits and Marine Corps and a A and I'll tell you. And I saw a training movie about pilots

that looked attractive. So I signed up.

I had met a lovely woman. We got married and we went on our honeymoon and went to Pensacola, FL. And I got airstick on the way down in the commercial planes. And that air sickness lasted for a while, but eventually I was very good at it. And I would be number two or three in each phase as we went through carrier and formation and so on down.

And lo and behold, and

Kingsville, TX, I finished and got my wings, went through Corpus and and then Kingsville. I remember it was rather dusty

and I was sent out to El Toro, CA. I remember driving across Texas drinking beer.

I thought that there was something wrong with my car because I was still in Texas.

I think I have been driving for three weeks and I was still in Texas

and I got to El Toro and we went into a Marine training squadron and it was so exciting. And by the, by the time I got finished there, the Korean War was over and we got sent overseas into a frontline fighter squadron with the pots stuffed airplanes of the 50s. They're all in mothballs now, but they're they were very exciting then.

And I began a a very exciting adventure.

We had six children, got transferred all over, did all kinds of different jobs, flew about 12 different kind of airplanes, came out of being a flight instructor in Pensacola and was sent to a photo squadron at Cherry Point during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And these planes were the fastest that I had flown. The Crusader was 1000 miles an hour. And then our radar plane was easy to fly. It had the radar guy

straight wing and you could fall asleep and that thing would keep going. So we flew the both type of missions.

My alcoholism had progressed to the point where I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms in the plane because I was

not drinking for eight to 10 hours prior to flying.

And it started as just

like a loss of vision, a peripheral vision. And then I would have the shakes and then I would start to sweat and then I would be extremely anxious. And I'm all alone in the plane. And I said this is just passing, it'll go away. But each month it got worse. And I remember a period of about eight months and near the end, I just didn't even want to get in the plane because I didn't know it was going to happen. I was not going to make it.

I wanted to just get out of my own skin. I've talked to other Alcoholics, they'd be getting a haircut and they had to leave. You just can't stay where you are anymore. You must run and go out, and that's what I was experiencing in my body.

But there was nowhere to go. And so sometimes I'd fly with one hand on the ejection seat and I'd fly the they could fly all of mission with the stick. It had all the buttons on it to take the pictures and all that.

And

the finale came, oddly enough, in the radar plane and that we were on a flight of four on the cross country.

And I started realizing that I had to get out of there. And I started looking around and that plane didn't have an ejection seat. I mean, I was going to get out. It was just, I'm sorry, but I'm leaving and

I just, I thought it's going to have a heart attack. It was just, you know, these withdrawals were getting worse. And that plane, you had to pull a panel up and there was some kind of a shoot and you slit out the bottom. When I was looking at it, trying to remember how it worked,

and I suddenly remembered the guy next to me didn't know how to fly.

And I said, well, I can't do that. So I called for an emergency. I declared an oxygen emergency. And when you have those, you have to land immediately. So the flight leader, believing it, found an Air Force Base nearby. And the four of us landed and we went to the club and drank

and they found no problem with the oxygen. And I came out the next morning and I just turned to the flight leader and I said I'm not going to do this anymore.

And,

and it was quite a

bit of shame to go back to that squadron

face my buddies. It's very exclusive squadron, only 15 pilots,

no lieutenants

and it took about 3 months for headquarters to give me a new specialty since I wasn't going to be flying and I could feel them looking at me. I was doing the legal work and they'd come by and I wouldn't even make eye contact with them. I just felt like I was a failure. After almost 13 years of flying, I had failed. I'm a piece of you know what? Then I could feel them looking at me as I was so happy when I finally got transferred out.

Well, last year I was out in Los Angeles and I was invited to talk at the Brentwood group. Great group. God, 500 people. It's all fired up. It's really something

and there was a lady coming there to get her 30 year medallion and her husband is not an AA but he comes to meetings with her and he's been a great supporter. And he was driving her there because she wasn't feeling too good. And she mentioned that she was excited. Sandy Beach was leading the meeting and he said was he a pilot? And she said yes. She said I think I know him, tell him to come out and let me talk to him.

So right before that, I'm going up the talk. I go out and meet this guy who I've never seen

and he looks at me and he said, 1962 you were flying an F3D radar plane in a flight of four on a cross country and you declared an oxygen emergency and the planes landed and you never flew again. And I went, how did you know that? He said I was in the plane with you

and I went wow. I said really? And he started filling me in on what was really going on.

I only had my vague memory.

And he was another pilot and there'd been a hurricane evacuation. And when that when that happens, you fly all the planes somewhere safe and then you drink until the hurricane goes by. And so there wasn't any radar guys going. It was all pilots that were going to go. And he had been recalled from American Airlines for the Cuban Missile Crisis and had just retired maybe

eight years earlier as the second senior pilot at American.

And there he was.

And so he came back the next day and brought photographs and all this stuff was up at the conference in Oxnard and started filling me in on who the guys were and what was going on. And then he said,

did you know how popular you were in that squadron?

Do you know how much everybody loved? Do you know how much it broke their hearts? Oh, the Colonel was doing everything he could. We it was just killing us that you were going through that. Oh my God.

So I had to go back to 1962 where I had all the shame

and go erase, erase, erase, erase, erase, erase, erase, erase and put in love and it felt great. I actually went back and changed my past and it felt great.

That's what Alcoholics Anonymous and spirituality is all about. That's what old ideas availis nothing mean they mean. Our old ideas are the ones we made-up under the circumstances of the time, and then we emotionally reacted to those ideas and we've been suffering ever since.

And that was one of those great freedoms from that three month period. And now I look back on it and it feels wonderful.

I There was no alcohol program in the military. There was nowhere for an alcoholic to go. There was nothing they could do to help me. Nobody ever heard of a A and so

it was just a blessing. And I was out there last week and I saw him again and we sat and talked. What a wonderful thing.

Anyway, I got, believe it or not, retrained as an air traffic controller

and did that

for a couple years

and it came time and then I was, I was overseas and I drank around the clock and I was very, very sick. I lost 50 lbs due to malnutrition. I was a disaster waiting to happen and I came back to Quantico, Virginia and had a ground mouth seizure. And that's how I ended up in the Bethesda Naval Hospital in about 5 days. The DT started and I guess I was screaming and running around. They put me in a straitjacket and locked me up for six months.

So that was how they treated alcoholism and 64

but in the hospital then a a group talked their way in even though the psychiatrist said they didn't have any Alcoholics. And that's how I heard about AA, so that

some months later when I was an outpatient and at home and I started drinking again and I called the inner group and they sent this guy over

and he took me to meeting every night

and the two of us were captains.

And when it came time for promotion, neither one of you get 2 years to get promoted to major or you're out.

And neither one of us made it. The first year he'd been in the same nut board and the second year he made it and I didn't. And so myself and my family and I mean, my six kids with two years sobriety are dumped out. I had a big resentment about God. OK, God, I did everything you said. Look what you're doing to my family. Look at us. We're out in the street. This is this is your love this year. Oh boy, I've really had a thing going with God,

had a wonderful resentment, and I just sat home. I didn't talk about it because people will get it away from you if you talk about it. You got it.

You want to keep a resentment? Don't tell anybody about it. For God's sake. Just stay at home and cook it in the oven.

Big. You won't be room. There won't be any room in the room for you with your resentment. It'll be so big.

And about 3 months after I was out,

the team of officers that I was working with, they went around putting out a presentation about the Marine Corps. It was headed by a general and they were going to Denver to do a presentation and they flew into a mountain.

So if it had been fair and I got my way, I would have been on that plane. And I knew when I read it in the paper that God knew I read it. And I felt kind of humble

because I just been cursing him. And I said something like, well, if you just told me this was going to happen, I wouldn't have been.

I wouldn't have been saying all that stuff.

So I guess that was my first lesson in that

you can't tell whether an event is good or bad. Events aren't good or bad, they just are.

They just are. We put the label on them and then we have to live with it. It just is.

And so that started my journey. I ended up with several other jobs, but I had a wonderful career with the credit union movement, which is a wonderful, blessed group of people that provide good service to

the people that need it not. It was an honor to be their lobbyist up in Washington and I remember come down to the Texas Credit Union League and talking. They were way ahead getting the bank and doing a lot of stuff. And so I had a great career with them. And then I retired to Tampa, FL 13 years ago and I adore it there. I live on the water and there's no tourists and it's quiet and it's a wonderful place.

So I have a lot of time to reflect about Alcoholics Anonymous and God and our history and

our steps and our traditions and all the people I've met and the memories and,

and I love it.

I love to reflect on what the world must look like through God's eyes,

and the more I do that, the more I'm getting closer to seeing what He sees. And I really believe that that's the point of everything, is to eventually get rid of

my old way of seeing things and be allowed the privilege of seeing God's world as it really is, and to see you and I as we really are. And that's just fun.

There's no other way to describe it except fun. What a cool thing. It's never bad. It's always good when I make it up. It's bad when I create my own reality. It's always bad. I never make up something good to sit up. Sit up at night.

And so this is what has happened to me as a result of these steps. When I sponsor someone,

I, I sponsor people my own way. And it's changed over the years and

now I set them down and I tell them the first day that I'm your spiritual guide and you will have a spiritual awakening and it is going to blow your mind. And when you have it, you will see a world that is so nice and comfortable that there won't be anything for alcohol to fix.

And that's why it's easy to not drink. I'm already comfortable. What do I need alcohol for?

And I feel that way myself. Bill writes in the 12 and 12 in step six that we've been granted a perfect release from alcoholism.

A perfect release. I haven't thought about drinking in 43 years.

When I look at alcohol when I'm troubled, I can hardly remember why it would help.

Now eating a stack of pancakes seems to help, or 50 lbs of cookies. So I indulge in all kinds of other things,

but alcohol, I don't understand how it could possibly help. It's been put in the category that it's so different and that I call freedom,

freedom from alcoholism.

And it's contingent, of course, on my being able to maintain this view

of God and you and I. And that's a very simple thing to maintain. I just stay close to AAI, work with people every single day. I'll probably go to two meetings a day. I don't hardly do anything. That is an A, a it's that's who I am. I just love it in the midst of this society.

I think about a a this way

we were talking about. There's a lot of things that we say that I see different now. Things happen in God's time.

Well, there's God and he's wearing a watch. Why don't you ask him what time it is? He looks at his watch and I'll tell you what he says. It's right now,

always has been and always will be. How about that watch? It says it's right now, no moving parts, and it's always right.

For eternity, it's always right,

and so that's the only place that God can be found. We can't have contact with God in the past or the future. So how do you get there? We talk a lot about the now, but how do you get there?

Well, I thought about that and I said to myself,

I think you get there the same way that you get to the truth about yourself,

which is what our steps do. And how do we get to the truth about ourselves? We get rid of everything that isn't the truth.

That's what we do. The steps are nothing more than getting rid of get rid of character defect, to get rid of old ideas, get rid of this, get rid of that, and then it gets revealed to you as an individual. God will constantly reveal more, reveal more, reveal more.

And so I said, well, maybe that's exactly how the now works. I get rid of everything that isn't the present moment,

which is the future or the past

now. A lot of us don't want to get rid of those things.

I don't want to get rid of my plans. I don't want to get rid of my causes. I don't want to get rid of my opinions. I don't want to get rid of my memories. I don't want to get rid of. There's all these forces that I created that I think are important that I want to hold on to. I want to hold on to this dream. OK, fine, go ahead and get it. But you won't get God's dream.

Go ahead. Well, you're asking too much.

You're asking too much in step 6.

We're entirely ready to have God remove all of my defects, which is all of me, everything that I constructed. I like to think of my defects as my Kingdom,

my world. The one I put together, the one I live in, the one I'm the center of.

That's my Kingdom. And I started putting it together when I was a little boy and I made a very scary place to hang out.

I don't know why I made it that way, but I did. I filled it with I'm no good. The world's no good. Watch out for this. This isn't fair. It's not fair. Nothings fair. See that? Look around. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair.

And I took God's world full of light and I patched it all up with my ideas about everything and pretty soon there's no light coming through. I just have the world I

assembled and lived in, and I got lonely in there and I got desperate.

I was tired of it. I'm tired of being alone, tired of hanging out in there waiting for me to think up something else to scare me.

It's lonely in there

and I got down to a point

which I just recently realized

where I became hopeless.

And it just occurred to me there's a hopeless paradox or a hope paradox.

I became so hopeless as a result of my drinking that I didn't even know what hope meant anymore.

I was absolutely without any hope.

And guess what happened? I grabbed God's hand.

God seems to come to us in the garbage pile,

in at the bottom,

at the bottom.

And I realized

that if I'm hopeless, I can touch God's hand. If I'm hopeful, I'm going to touch God's hand later down the road. I'm so hopeful that I will be happy someday. I'm so hopeful that I'll be with God someday. I'm so hopeful that everything will work out well someday.

That's a lot of time spent away from the present moment. Matter fact, that's where I spend most of my life,

waiting. Waiting for the next moment, which is going to be better than this moment.

Oh, it's going to be a lot better. Boy, when I get promoted, boy, when we have a baby, boy when I get to retire, boy,

I'm this close. I don't know to what but this close all the time

and I never stopped to see if it was already here.

Wasn't it handed to me the day it was born?

It's here I have to stop

and eliminate everything

that separates me from God and the present moment. I think the search for God and for the present moment and for my true self is the same search.

Find one, you find all three. Find one. You find all three.

And so I love the search. What does it say? How many times does it say seek

in our literature? God couldn't would if he were sought sought to a prayer and meditation become a seeker. I remember when we were flying jets, we had the they came out with a heat seeking missile and when they fired that thing and you're in the other plane, you're generating a lot of heat with that jet engine and that little missile is going. I wonder where some heat is.

Pretty effective thing. It goes right to the tailpipe.

And so I think that we can become God seeking just like that.

My hero in a a is Chuck Chamberlain. I suppose Bill's writings. I had such a lack of perspective on history that when my friend Hal Marley would say you want to go to New York and meet Bill Wilson, not go, no,

I haven't got enough money. I got besides who? What do I want to meet him for? I need money. I need a job. I got to do this. And I remember he went up there six years in a row

and then Bill died. What do you think I would give to have met him? To just have shaken his hand and say I met Bill Wilson,

but Chuck Chamberlain I did meet and I went to his house and sat and looked over the Pacific and listened to him talk and listen to him talk and talk about conscious separation

in my consciousness. I felt that I was separate from God when I honestly, you could have put a lie detector on me and said, do you feel God? No, I don't see him anywhere. He's nowhere in my consciousness. That's because I had built a Kingdom of my own and he wasn't in it.

That's the only way I could ever get separated from God. God is everything. If God is everything, then he's me and you. And how could you be separated from

God? I mean, how could you possibly be separated from God?

And I think I made-up a poem. I don't even know if I can remember it.

Where shall I hide? I said. Where I will never find me.

I know I'll pretend that I'm not mean or you, nor he. I'll hide in my story and pretend that it's real.

I'll believe what I think and I'll feel what I believe,

and I lie trapped in a web of my feelings and forget that I am the creator of the web. Oh boy, what a joke on me.

What a joke. I myself, through my own thinking, self-centered thinking, created a place where God doesn't exist. And I dwelled in there and it got very lonely. And I didn't believe you when you said there was a God, but I had one thing that everyone has, and you can't get away from it. And that's the need for God.

It's there. There's this emptiness, there's this remembrance

of what the union with God feels like, and it's missing and it won't go away. And alcohol temporarily fixed it, but it's still fair and it stays there. And we try to fix it with everything else, power and sex and drugs and whatever, but it won't go away. It's still there. It still says you're lonely. You're still just you. You're not there, you're not there. And a A comes and punches a hole

in that shell.

And my sponsor started pulling me out

and I love it. I love what I see. I see now that you and I are connected. I see that if I am rude and hurt you, it hurts me, hurts me right away.

I'm hurting myself when I offend you, and I can see that now. It used to be a theory. Now I can see it. And it's wonderful to realize that we're all connected, that we're all just part of God's great creation.

I think the steps

are described in the letter that Bill Wilson wrote in his later years

and he wrote to someone, he says. As I reflect upon AA, this is what I see.

I see an utter simplicity which in cases a complete mystery.

This is a simple program,

and in its simplicity

we walk in to the mystery of the universe.

It's so simple.

It's mind boggling in its simplicity. When I first got here, you said don't drink. I went don't drink. I got a lot of problems. You want you don't drink. You think that's the whole solution?

Now what do I tell a new guy? Just don't drink.

2 words. That's the entire plan. Don't drink and then come over and we'll talk and we'll be guided.

And so if I looked at a A today and I tried to reduce it to two words,

the entire EA program, I would say it's very simple. Let go.

That's it. How about that? There's nothing else to do but to let go. Absolutely. Now, to let go absolutely requires a lot of faith because you're jumping into the unknown.

We're going

out where God lives.

I'm going to let go of everything I'm familiar with my little resentments, my little prejudices, my little favorites from all the things that are familiar. They're miserable, but they're familiar, and I'm going to reach out. I love the paintings,

Michelangelo of man reaching, reaching out and trying to touch

and part of him not wanting to holding back, holding back. My pride doesn't want me to let God win. I want to stay in my I want my own Kingdom, let God have his Kingdom. I want one of mine. I don't want to go there. See, in my Kingdom, I'm the king. Everything I do, it's what I say goes.

But it's miserable. It's terrible in here. It's it's awful, it's dark, it's rotten, it's stinks. I've been here forever. I can't stand it. But at least I'm in charge.

At least I'm in charge. You're talking about a place that's full of happiness and light and love. What's my role there,

Servant?

You want me to go from a king to a servant?

Me a servant? Yeah. That's the happiest you will ever be is to be a servant.

And so how do I do that? Let go,

let go, let go some more. Let go of this, let go of that.

Letting go. I mean, how could it be that simple? Some of our speakers have talked about

they ought to put a warning label on problems and the warning label says warning. Do not think about this problem, it'll make it blow up.

When we have a problem, the first thing we should do is to let go of it immediately, like a hot cold. God, I got this terrible thing here.

That's the best thing you could ever do with any problem that you have. Is immediately go a problem?

Just let it go.

I tell people to go to the movies.

You got terrible problems. Everything's wrong. You're thinking of suicide. Go to the movies,

buy a ticket when you go there, go out to the street, look at the tickets, see how long the movie lasts, and look, God, I'm going to be in the movie for two hours and 13 minutes. I'm going to give you everything because I just want to watch the movie. I just want to watch it. I love the cartoons, I love the previews. I love all that and I want to just watch the movie where you watch everything while I'm watching the movie

and then you just watch the movie. Yay, the popcorn. I get popcorn, Coca-Cola. I'm like this.

I don't rent movies. I go. I want to be there in the movie theater itself watching and then I come out. Amazing. The work he did in two hours and 13 minutes on all those problem, they seem to be in harmony. They seem to somehow be alright. I see solutions.

God is doing for me what I can't do for myself.

When I see the sentence, this too shall pass, I go. Perhaps it should say this too. Can be let go of

because it's not going to pass until I let go of it.

You want some help? Yeah. I I can't help to go off it. Oh, OK. And there it is. Whatever needs to be taken care of. God is standing there. What do you need done?

Let me do it. Let me do it. And part of me doesn't want to do that because then he gets the credit.

I'm reduced to a non role in my own life

and I realize now I try not to pay much attention to my life. I try to just watch it. What's going on with me today? Look at that. How about that?

It's almost an observer, a bystander. Well, look at this. There you are, worrying. I'll be at the movie.

Don't wait up for me.

There's part of me that likes to keep Orient up up front and I go, good, you good worry. I'm going to go off and go to a meeting and listen to my friend talk. And

Alanon talks about detachment. I think we can detach from our own lives,

just stay on our spiritual path, stay with our hands in hand with God.

And so that letting go

is the utter simplicity

and we walk in and and just think of how our literature ends, walking hand in hand,

putting our hand in God's and justice walking.

That's what's available

if I'm willing to let go. And so it's no wonder the six step talks about the struggle of perfection, of perfectly letting go. No one can become perfect. Obviously it's impossible, but perfect helps available. The only thing standing between me and total contact with God is my reluctance to let it happen.

And that's what's standing between you

and perfect happiness, is the reluctance to let it happen.

Isn't that amazing that we just sit there ruining our own lives?

Yeah, I could be happy, but I'm not gonna let me yet.

I'm not through with me yet.

I got some more beating up to do. I got some more guilt to do. I got some more rage. I got some more. I mean, you can just feel it. You mean I'm just going to give all this up? I won't even keep track of the election.